At 5:33am this morning my wife gave birth to our third child, Lillian Elizabeth Slaven. Mum and bub are doing fine & should be out of hospital tomorrow, God willing. Prayers for them are appreciated (and for me, that I’ll be able to cope!)

I’m likely to be incommunicado for the next few days, so if anyone posts any questions about Wordpress plugins, I will get back to you, just probably next week some time.

Photo here

It’s now 15 minutes past the day when baby number three was due.

Any time now….

… any time at all…

Last update: version 2.5 has been released

Update Again: New version of the plugin now available

Another Update: A call for beta testers for version 2.0 of the plugin

Update: This plugin has been updated to include support for enclosures.

Previously, the VotD script on the sidebar of this site was generated by a perl script that parsed the RSS feed provided by Good News Publishers for the ESV bible.

To setup this script required you to copy the script into your cgi-bin, setup a location for the cache file, add the script to cron to run daily & then put the include tags into the code. This was all well & good for nerds such as myself who’re familiar with this, but it was a bit of a stretch for the general public. Also, I’ve found that a surprising number of hosting companies don’t allow their customers access to cron.

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Finally got around to uploading my first WordPress plugin to the Wordpress Plugins Repository. I’ll now be using the repository to host the plugin and to do any further development on. The latest version can be found here. I’ve also updated the WordPress Plugins Database entry for this plugin, so the one-click install pulls from the Repository now.

Go the doggies, into the semi-finals!

The Western Bulldogs have progressed to the semi-finals of the Wizard Home Loans Cup after scoring a thrilling 11-point win over 2004 pre-season premiers St Kilda at Launceston’s
Aurora Stadium on Friday night.

Rodney Eade’s Dogs had the lead for most of the night, and were able to hold out the pressing Saints to triumph 2.10.7 (85) to 1.9.11 (74). They now meet either Carlton or Melbourne in next week’s semi-final.

Yes, I know that yet again, in the second half, the opposition was allowed to claw back (into the lead this time). But if they can keep pulling off the win, I’ve decided I don’t care.

Game highlight: Farren Ray kicking a massive ’super-goal’ (such a dumb name. super-goal that is, not Farren) at the end of the 3^rd put the Doggies back in front, followed up with the first goal of the 4^th to galvanise the lead.

The one item on my to-do list which has been there the longest has been to add a CMS to control the news section on our website. Typical for a web-development company, our own website is the last thing on our priority. Well, today I can knock it off my list, all thanks to WordPress. After toying with a couple of proprietary products, or the possibility of writing something myself (yeah, sure, I’ve got the time for that) I realised that all I really wanted was a cut-down blog. There’s no need for comments or any of the other features, but the interface, along with the ability to restrict authors to certain activities fit the bill exactly. Not to mention the ability to have RSS/Atom feeds.

Because I had limited time, the solution I came up with is a bit of a messy hack, but it works. I have a fairly simple principle with development: If it works, it was the right way to do it.

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